What can/should I do to protect, secure, backup, etc.?

Earlier in this series, I answered the question about migrating to a different host. In that article, I gave an overview on how to backup your database.

Technically, you can use the same instructions to backup your blog. Do a database dump via phpMyAdmin (ask your host if you don’t know how to use this) and FTP your files down. You could also, if your adept and have the necessary SSH access, setup a cron job to run a script that will dump your database and archive it along with all your files on a daily or weekly basis.

It might seem like I’m dodging this question, but that is only due to the fact that there are lots of ways to do this.

Instead, I’ll talk about backups in general. Whenever you make any major changes to your blog ecosystem, you should back up your database. That means, whenever you upgrade, move to a new host, close down a blog – back up! You don’t know if you’ll need that data again.

Failure to backup, and subsequently messing something up, does not constitute a WordPress problem. :-)